Posted by SLS on May 4, 2012, at 11:44:42
In reply to Re: ADs may do more Harm than Good -New Research paper » SLS, posted by zazenducke on May 4, 2012, at 10:33:22
> > > "Crazy Like Us" describes the campaign to teach Japan how to be depressed. And this was done without direct advertising of meds. It was public service announcments to sell the illness and then the AD sales followed.
> > According to the book, when did the US begin this campaign process in Japan?
> I don't have the book at hand but this from the NYTimes
> In the late 1980's, Eli Lilly decided against selling Prozac in Japan after market research there revealed virtually no demand for antidepressants.There are several reasons for this, including a cultural bias against admitting mental illness and an insurance program that would not cover antidepressants.
> Throughout the 90's, when Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s, were traveling the strange road from chemical compound to cultural phenomenon in the West, the drugs and the disease alike remained virtually unknown in Japan.
The disease became known once it became culturally more acceptable to admit depression. It is not surprising that psychopharmacology lagged behind the West. It still does.
The West exported penicillin to Japan. The pathogens were already there. We just helped the Japanese to identify and treat them.
> Then, in 1999, a Japanese company, Meiji Seika Kaisha, began selling the S.S.R.I. Depromel. Meiji was among the first users of the phrase kokoro no kaze. The next year, GlaxoSmithKline -- maker of the antidepressant Paxil -- followed Meiji into the market. Koji Nakagawa, GlaxoSmithKline's product manager for Paxil, explained: ''When other pharmaceutical companies were giving up on developing antidepressants in Japan, we went ahead for a very simple reason: the successful marketing in the United States and Europe.''Capitalism. I wouldn't presume to know all of the things that were inside the heads of the decision-makers, but capitalism still works to save people's lives. I guess conspiracy is in the eye of the beholder. One person's education of a culture is another's disinforming that culture using propaganda. I don't doubt that the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies are given the responsibility to foster sales of product regardless of the science or clinical practice behind it. That's their job. They do this with good drugs as well as bad drugs.
I am biased. My personal experience has demonstrated to me that my depression is a biological illness that responds to biological interventions while psychotherapeutic interventions proved ineffective.
Psychiatry has made a mess of things. Overconfidence and premature announcements have diminished credibility. The inexactitude of those treatment methods that involve trial-and-error begs to question the competence of the entire psychiatric field. Yes, it is quite a mess, but I don't believe that there are master puppeteers steering the practice of psychiatry to create that mess. Science is resolved to cure depression throughout the world. That's one hell of a conspiracy.
- ScottSome see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1016380
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20120425/msgs/1017113.html